


Love may not be blind but I sure as hell am

by AcrylicMist



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Meteorstuck, One Shot, Other, cantown, terezi is fed up with his crap
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-31
Updated: 2018-10-31
Packaged: 2019-08-11 05:45:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,838
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16469873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AcrylicMist/pseuds/AcrylicMist
Summary: It's time for an intervention.





	Love may not be blind but I sure as hell am

**Author's Note:**

> A one shot to practice writing Terezi again

Terezi was probably the only one who knew what she was doing. Out of all six people left alive on the meteor she felt like she was the only one who had a fucking clue about what the fuck was going on.

This wasn’t a good realization. Terezi had grown past the time when being the only competent player would make her feel superior- now she just wanted teammates she could trust in a game bent on their destruction. 

She steeled herself and took stock of what she had to work with.

Terezi looked at Dave, her face serious. Or rather, she turned her head to him and sniffed. Yep, she could smell the melancholy downward tilt to his shoulders from here. 

Cantown was silent today. WV was off somewhere else and Terezi and Dave were the only two people kneeling on the can-gridded floor. It smelled dark, slightly musty, like how a room with no windows smelled. Terezi was used to the staleness by now. Every breath tasted stale here. 

Terezi grinned at Dave. The expression didn’t quite reach the corners of her mouth. “How are you doing, cool kid?”

Dave’s expression didn’t change at the unexpected question. It rarely did, and only when Dave was trying to hide something. “Why’d you ask?” Dave said, already set to ramble with that cockiness Terezi knew was a sham. “Are you worrying about me?” Cue impish grin, the same expression she’d once been dumb enough to fall for.

“No,” Terezi deadpaned as she set a can down in the judicial district to speak her mind into the dramatic atmosphere she’d created. “I’m worried about Karkat.”

There it was, the slightest change in the human’s face. “Why?” Dave asked. 

“Why don’t you ever invite him to our town meetings?” Terezi asked Dave, her chin lifted. “He stopped coming when you started hanging out with me.”

“Hanging out,” Dave scoffed. “Rezi, you wound me.”

They were still ‘human dating’, as Dave called it. Terezi thought it was funny. Dave was a funny dude for complaining about how trolls obsessed over quadrants and what to call what relationship when he literally did the same exact thing at the first opportunity presented to him. 

Or maybe he was being ironic. It was hard to tell when Dave was being serious, but Terezi was getting better at it. 

“Avoiding the question won’t help,” Terezi advised. 

“It’s not important,” Dave said , sitting beside her. She heard the subtle drag of his cape behind him as he shifted closer. “What’s on the agenda today? Didn’t we decide that the industrial district needed to be bigger?” He reached for a can, determined to force their conversation back into safe areas. 

It was stupid. Terezi was sick to death of being the only one with a single fucking clue about what was going on. Rose, Kanaya, dave, even fucking Karkat- they were all morons.

Gamzee almost didn’t count- the clown had lost what little sense he’d ever had and not even Karkat could fish his ex-moirail out of the mess he was in.

Rose and Kanaya were too busy being happy together or drinking that human soporific that Rose seemed eerily fond of, the one that slurred her words and dulled her eyes that Terezi thought smelled like clear, rotten fruit, like something left to get sticky in the sun. 

She just stared at Dave wordlessly, long enough for him to get uncomfortable and look away first. Bingo. The clawbeast was out of the bag. She was onto something. “I said,” she repeated, “That I’m worried about Karkat.”

Karkat walked like it hurt him to move, like he’d break apart at the seams if he dared to pick up his feet or unbend his spine. Sometimes she sniffed him watching her, watching Dave, watching them together in Cantown like he longed to join them but didn’t dare to.

Dave was… well, that was complicated. 

Terezi sniffed this, Dave saw it, and Karkat acted like he didn’t notice his own miserable posture and the cycle of ignoring things went on and on until Terezi wanted to scream. 

She hated this. 

She hated how Kanaya and Rose drank away the moments out of each other or a bottle and acted like that made everything okay. 

She hated Karkat for being reduced to this new, timid creature more than she hated the thing that had caused it, as if she could bring herself to inflict her hate on something as impersonal and inanimate as a mutation. It was an infestation that turned her one-time leader’s scent sour and reddish, that bent his spine under the weight of his own shoulders as he slumped around the meteor.

Terezi was also the only one who knew how bad things had gotten. Or, at least she was the only one bold enough to admit it. Karkat loved to act invincible, but he couldn’t hide from her sharp nose and she had the smell of his candied blood etched into her sinus cavities each time the troll stood to the side and watched them from a distance, like he still thought they cared about his fucking aberrant bloodcolor, the fucking moron. 

Or maybe it was just the guilt that caused him to stay away. Once there had been twelve trolls on this meteor, not three-and-Gamzee. Did Karkat blame himself for failing to stop the deaths that had happened?

But if Karkat’s behavior was bad- Dave was worse. 

Karkat at least had the common sense to keep his distance. Trolls didn’t do weakness or sickness and he stayed by himself out of self-preservation. Not that Terezi or Kanaya would have acted on the instinctive trigger his blood caused in them, the violence, the urge to scrub out the stain. Karkat was still… not their leader, but he was her friend. She _respected_ him. She once cared about him until he grew to controlling and insufferable to bear, when he blamed her for his own shortcomings until she’d been fed up with his bullshit.

Terezi couldn’t wait forever for Karkat to pick a fucking quadrant and stick to it, especially when there were other, more interesting fish to fry and skulls to crack.

Dave, on the other hand, kept finding new and creative ways to get on her rapidly fraying nerves. 

At first she was okay with it. It was new; it was interesting. They laughed and made fun of the game that had taken so much from them, traded away passing hours in shitty art as the days crept slowly by in Cantown. 

She never called them Matesprits, too strong-willed to classify what little they shared as a quadrant. Dave said they were dating, like his human vernacular made a fucking difference when he acted too casual about everything and scoffed at her first few attempts to turn their relationship into something serious. It was a failed effort from the start when Dave was anything but genuine and seemed content to use her as nothing more than a distraction. 

So she swallowed her pride and let it happen. It was fun, wasn’t it? Cantown gained a judicial system and construction on the new court block was underway. It was okay for them to waste time, to treat each other as friends and companions and nothing more even if Dave lied and said he’d be okay with more, always more, but pulled away whenever she tried to do more than hold his hand. 

For a long time she thought the problem was herself- she was too alien, too sharp, too ugly. Then she realized the problem was with him. 

He didn’t actually like her like that. The realization hurt, which was strange because she never liked him either, but they were alone and young and jegus what else was there to do on this fucking meteor?

It was a major wake up to realize that their relationship was just as much of a fantasy as the town they built out of old cans. They drew out lines for streets and drafted laws, testing the waters for when hopefully in the future they’d do the same thing but mean it then.

The same went for their relationship and Terezi was okay with it. They were both practicing on each other. By then she didn’t want anything serious with Dave and wasn’t sure why she ever had. The urge to fill her quadrants and fill them fast had faded as she accepted the fact that Alternia wasn’t coming back. 

She could take her time. Terezi didn’t need to fill her quadrants or die anymore! She could choose. 

And she didn’t want Dave, not like that. The realization felt like freedom, but the red human was still her friend and she didn’t like to see him unhappy so she continued to spend her time with him, content with what they had. 

Then she sniffed out the pattern. Dave was practicing his skills at relationships for a reason. The fact that the reason had nubby horns and a shouty voice factored in quite a lot with her.

And that left Terezi here, again the only person who had a single fucking clue, building a town out of cans for shits and giggles with an alien who still thought they were dating.

Motherfuckers. If this was the most interesting thing to happen in this flying rock it was going to be a long sweep and a half. 

Dave still hadn’t said anything in return, which was unusual and let her know she’d hit a nerve. She dug deeper, prying for more information. “Why don’t I go and get him?”

The verbal jab worked- Dave nearly flinched. Or he came as close to a flinch as Terezi had sniffed from him, a subtle tightening at the corners of his mouth, the cords in his neck stiff. “Let’s not,” Dave said, like he could change her mind. “I thought this was an us thing. You know, Cantown. Us and the Mayor.”

“ _Us_ thing?” Terezi croaked, raising her eyebrows over her blinded eyes, sensing blood in the water. 

Dave smelled distinctly uncomfortable. Terezi let another can clack loudly into place. The sound echoed in the stillness. 

“Yeah,” Dave said at last, an almost imperceptible waver in his voice. “Us, like, you know… us thing.”

Terezi raised her eyebrows at the lame response. “And Karkat isn’t invited to this prestigious human ‘us thing’?” 

“Well, I never said that, exactly,” Dave said, fidgeting. “What I meant was-”

“Dave,” Terezi said, placing another can into the tower she was constructing. The human broke off min-sentence. She let the silence stretch between them, uncomfortably long, before she said, “I think you should stop lying to yourself.”

“What?” Dave said sharply. “Lying about what? I’ve already got all my shit together.”

“The court finds you guilty of evasion!” Terezi proclaimed without looking up. She wasn’t in the mood for courtblock roleplay, not when Karkat was on the line. She might not have felt red for the troll, but she still cared about him and felt that he deserved more than this.

That was partly her fault, wasn’t it? She’d pushed him away as well, so now it was up to her to get these two idiots together before she pulled out her own hair with frustration. Where was Nepeta for cases like this? Terezi missed the oliveblood. She missed her eager roleplay and cat-like wit. Terezi missed Feferi and her bubbly joy. Shit, she even fucking missed the old Gamzee. The truth was that there was so much to miss that she ended up missing nothing because to contemplate exactly what or who she should miss at any given time was mentally exhausting. 

Dave still didn’t meet her blind eyes. 

“Dave,” Terezi chided, deadpan. “I know about your human crush on Karkat.”

Dave tensed. She could smell the flush of color that rode up his neck to color his pale cheeks scarlet. It was such a delicious color and Terezi could have verbally destroyed the coolkid over it, but now was not the time for games. 

“I don’t have a crush on him,” Dave answered automatically, the words sounding stiff. 

“You do,” Terezi told him. “I know. I can tell.”

“Okay, I’ll believe a lot of things,” Dave said, leaning back. “But I’m calling bullshit of you being able to sniff out my actual feelings.”

“I can,” Terezi said quietly. “I can hear your bloodpusher beating. Your scent changes when you look at him.” She left out the more damning details for the sake of his ego. She set another can into place. “Dave” she said, leaning over the tower she had built. “Why do you think we work on building Cantown?”

“Because the Mayor likes it,” Dave answered, shrugging. “Because there’s nothing else to do.”

“Did you ever think that we were practicing?” Terezi asked sadly. “For when we had to do the real thing if we win the game? Did you ever think that you were doing the same thing with _me?_ ”

Dave didn’t answer, but she heard him swallow painfully. 

“Dave,” Terezi said, her voice sharp. “You don’t like me. Not like how you want to like me.”

Dave said absolutely nothing.

Terezi continued mercilessly. “You like Karkat,” she said. “Not me. And I’m okay with that, really, I am, but I’m not okay with being used as a distraction as you try to run from your red feelings for him.”

“I’m-” Dave tried to interrupt her, but she wasn’t nearly done yet.

“No,” Terezi cut him off, waving her dragoncane. “This comes down to a conflict of interests. You cannot continue pursuing me when you are interested in someone else. That’s just insulting to both of us.”

“Okay.” Dave said. He didn’t say anything after that, so Terezi tried again. 

“Okay,” She said. “So… Karkat?”

“Maybe I am interested in him,” Dave admitted carefully, not looking at her. “But that doesn’t mean that I’m using you as a distraction. I _like_ hanging out with you. I _like_ it when we’re having fun.”

“Is _this_ fun?” Terezi asked, and another can clacked into place on the floor. Dave flinched at the sudden noise. Terezi didn’t feel guilty for it. She did the same thing with another can, building a misplaced tower in the middle of a road to prove her point. The noise echoed. She reached for a third can.

“Alright,” Dave said, stopping her hand. Sometimes, she forgot how fast the human could move. Dave spent so much of his time milling around that she forgot that he could flash forward so fast his smell left a shadow behind him that blurred his shape. His pale hand flashed out and caught her cool fingers. “Stop.”

She put her hand down, waiting. 

Dave released her hand like it’d burned him. “What do you want me to do?” he asked. “Go after him?”

“That would be the idea, yes,” Terezi said. “Dave, do you think that Karkat is blind? He sees how you look at him. He knows how you feel.”

“No, he doesn’t,” Dave argued. 

Terezi restrained herself from strangling some sense into the human alien. Using force would get her nowhere with Dave because when pushed, he gave in. He avoided conflict like it was the plague. “He does,” Terezi said. “Love may not be blind but I sure as hell am, and Karkat isn’t. He fucking _knows_ , Dave.”

“That’s not the right saying,” Dave told her, shaking his head. “It’s love _is_ blind.”

“What?” Terezi said, curious despite herself. “But that’s so stupid.”

“That’s how the saying goes,” Dave said, shrugging. “What do you want me to do about it?”

“Go after him, coolkid,” Terezi ordered, pointing the head of her dragoncane at his chest. “He’s waiting on you.”

“Won’t that mess up our friendship?” Dave asked, worried.

“So you admit it’s just a friendship?” Terezi asked, cornering him with his own words. 

“I, well…. Maybe?” Dave said, not willing to admit anything. 

“Yes, Dave,” Terezi said. “I have caught John’s human disease called friendship and it appears to be contagious. We’re friends. Chasing after Karkat isn’t going to change that,” She promised. “But,” she warned. “If you keep avoiding him, I’ll be forced to bring this negligence before the court of friendship to be judged.”

“Okay,” Dave gave him, a small smile flitting about his face. “I’ll talk to him.”

“Now,” Terezi said, hurrying him up with the blunt end of her cane. “Up! Up up up! Go get him!”

Dave ducked gracefully under her mock blows, grinning all the while as he picked his way through the can-strewn floor to the door. He paused at the exit, his shoulders pensive. “Terezi?” he called behind him.

“What is it?” She asked. 

“Thank you,” Dave said, and then he left the room.

Terezi sat alone in the empty Cantown, smelling all of the creation they had built around them out of nothing and hoped beyond hope that this would be the start of something great.

**Author's Note:**

> I really love writing from her point of view, and this is just an introspective look at what might have happened
> 
> for fun
> 
> its nice to do one shots every now and then


End file.
